I wake up before 7 A.M. because of the party of young dutch students that took over the hostel yesterday. Overgrown by cattle hormones, absurdly tall and loud even when they barely move around on the old wooden floor, dutch guys and girls seem to be in every room of the hostel and in every bathroom and under every shower and into every room at this floor and at every floor of this part of the hostel. The hostel extends itself over several street numbers so I don't know if they took over there too. Anyway the turn-over for the bathrooms and showers has started slowly, and noisily, and as I lay in bed in my room I try to identify the moment when the bathroom on my floor will finally be accessible. I curse the dutch people of the world and try to sleep or at least masturbate but without success, 'cause they have now decided to hang just outside my door waiting for their turn, horsing around, calling down from the top of the stairwell, talking and laughing.

It's not before 9 that I can eventually use the bathroom and take a shower. By then the dutch world is gathering its people across the street, and is being noisy down there in the sun. From the window of my room they now look less noisy and less tall and are instead quite good looking, with their blond and red heads glowing under the bright sun light scouring 20th street out of the frozen snow.

I love this Hostel. I have my own double bed room, all run-down and sloppy, luckily no television. There are common bathrooms all right, but it's not a problem for me. Well, as long as the dutch leave something for me.
There is no curfew, it is all very clean, and it's in Chelsea, Manhattan. It is ridiculously pricey, but only compared to similar places outside New York or in Europe. It is actually cheap for the standards here.

From the Hostel I walk down towards the village, have breakfast somewhere (I wish there were alternatives to the fucking starbucks of my boots) and then I probably head towards a cyber cafe' in Bleecker street that seem to be run by a very nice middle-aged chinese lady who doesn't speak english except for two essential words, and who sweeps and mops the floor under your feet while you're there writing.

Afterwards it's the city, it's my being useless into its belly, it's bars I never dared to enter (thanks, Dita) and my feelings come and go, and at moments all the beauty of it, all its lively magic, all the moving accumulation of sorrows in the shaded maze of the subways hits me with a smell and a push, like the banal solitudes, the young couples kissing on the trains at night, the displays of fish and algae in Chinatown, the fabric stores I enter imagining what Libi would think or say of the colors and the materials, where the old jewish store manager tells me, "if you think you can pick the fabrics for your friend you must think you're very good."
And he's right, I mean. I could never pick the right fabrics.

in picture, above: you know what. It has nothing to do with the hostel though.

"Since Pig-type people have more peaceful lifestyle than others, they are therefore luckier."

yesterday, new year of the pig. I don't know if my secret animal gets along with the pig, so i don't know if only being a pig is really going to help this year. I mean, aside of what the others may think of me, because I look like a lucky pig to them.

Today I realized that I have to get me a new chipped biometric passport and I have only three weeks left to get it. The sheer idea of having to be biometrically scanned makes me want to cancel my trip. It is creepy, to use a teenagerly word. It's fascist, to use a enraged one. It's dark, to go with Philip Dick. I can't stand the idea. It's disgusting the way my government caved in so easily and already adopted the biometric electronic passports.
I thought of it as something shameful that was going to happen in the future, but as far as shameful things go, evidently the future is today. I was so naive to hope somehow that these changes weren't really going to happen.

So today we're in the year of the pig. Yeah I believe in astrology, why not? I only wish I knew how to handle it.

Seriuosly, Kundera was right. We are so living in the age of the terminal paradoxes. They say 'globalization', and yet never like today to travel is a challenge, and a limitation to your liberty. Until 1914 you could travel everywhere in the world, except maybe for Russia, without a passport. All you had to do was to put enough money together to buy yourself a passage on a ship. Any destination. Then came the age of the plane, the radio, the atomic bomb, the television. The rhetoric and propaganda went on bragging how small the planet was becoming and how traveling was now so easy when it was all the contrary.
The peak of this process, stemming from the two world wars, is supposed the be the globalization of present times, the borderless world etcetera. As with any good terminal paradox though, never before globalization and large scale immigrations borders, and difference of cultures, have been so relevant, and dividing. Not even in Italy during the middle ages, when banners dived city from city.

So the real point is not being favorable or not to 'globalization'... but to understand what the hell 'globalization' is supposed to be. As far as my understanding goes, is not 'globalization' --as in: freedom to travel and be whatever you want-- if A and B and C citizens are formalized on papers, if the flow of money keeps going upward and upward, if you have to acquiesce to fingerprinting and biometric scanning to take a trip across the atlantic on your own planet.